


Entertaining the Troops

by Trystero



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Humour, Songfic, melancholia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-25
Updated: 2013-10-25
Packaged: 2017-12-30 10:38:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1017600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trystero/pseuds/Trystero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way people in Novac describe Carla always makes me think of Marilyn Monroe...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sgt. Craig Boone, top sniper in the NCR’s First Reconnaissance unit, isn’t a man who smiles often. Even as a kid back in the West he had been a quiet, serious type, friendly enough but not given to the silly jokes and pranks that occupied other children. Few people had ever seen him laugh; and when he did it was just a soft “Heh,” never more.

But tonight Boone is smiling and smiling big. He sits at a table in the Aces Lounge Bar with the other snipers from his unit, sweating in the evening heat and sipping beer with a wide grin on his face, giving him the aspect of a golden retriever who’s just been for a swim.

It’s early summer in 2279, and First Recon is on leave, much-needed R&R after a long tour which, amongst assorted skirmishes, small triumphs and near-disasters, included the unforgettable, grand balls-up at Bitter Springs. 

They are all exhausted, and Boone, as the unit’s go-to guy, and also the man who cares the most about what they do and what they have done, is so dog-tired to his bones that he feels half asleep and half hysterical, like a zombie in search of brains. The beer is going straight to his head, and the burden he feels the perpetual weight of is shifting. Not going away, just moving around. He can’t quite focus on it. It hovers behind him, pounces out and flattens him, vanishes for a beautiful millisecond then appears above his head, crushing him again.

He’s smiling not so much because he’s happy, but because he’s embarrassed. It is his birthday, and everyone is making a fuss of him. The last four years, his birthday passed wholly unremarked on, the way he likes it. This year everyone suddenly seems to think it worth celebrating. It’s not completely real. He knows they feel sorry for him. It’s embarrassing.

He wonders if they also know he is going to leave.

“To a great shooter, and a great comrade!” they salute him with their beer bottles, banging them together so hard the thick glass might actually break. Like they want them to break, and cut their hands. _More blood!_ Things don’t seem real to First Recon anymore unless there’s blood. Undamaged things are displeasingly fragile. Predestined to be destroyed. The men and women of First Recon, damaged themselves, instinctively want to cut to the chase, smash everything now and get it over with.

First Recon feel most alive in the midst of death. Craig Boone has always known that, but at first it didn’t bother him. Now it haunts his every moment. He wants out.

Boone nods and grins, accepts their stinging back-slaps and meets their bottles with his own. It’s phony but it’s better than nothing. It’s definitely better than thinking his own thoughts. Those have been frighteningly dark lately.

On stage, the Rad Pack are performing a song. Something about a woman being a lucky charm.  
 _Don't want a silver dollar_  
 _Rabbit's foot on a string_  
 _The happiness in your warm caress_  
 _No rabbit's foot can bring_

Happiness in a warm caress. Boone wonders if he could find happiness there. Would that be all it takes? That would be too good to be true, and everyone knows what they say about things that are too good to be true. 

When’s the last time someone held him... that caravan chick delivering stuff to Camp McCarran who had jumped his bones after the Battle of Hoover Dam. Hadn’t done anything for his state of mind that time. Nothing long-lasting anyway. Though it hadn’t been warm caresses so much as grabbing and clawing, maybe that was the difference. Or that his state of mind had not been so grim then. Or the fact that he never saw her again, and he knew he meant nothing to her. Just a slab of meat. Same as he was to the top brass at the NCR. They had fucked him too. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Boone wonders if he will ever find a woman who genuinely likes him, one who wants to be with him, once and for all time. It would sure be nice.

The Rad Pack finish their song and the singer goes offstage alone, the musicians staying behind to provide accompaniment to the next act. There’s a pause. Boone watches the stage, feigning interest to avoid laughing at a tired old joke his spotter is telling. He takes a big swig of beer. Then he nearly forgets to swallow.

A woman with softly curving platinum hair and heavy black eyelashes sashays out to centre stage. She is wearing the slipperiest, shiniest dress Boone has ever seen. It’s hot pink and matches her gloves and lips, sparkling in the footlights.

“I wanna be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you,” she purrs, her eyes lazily sweeping the room, and coming to rest on Boone. “I wanna be loved by you alone. Booboop bedoop!” She puckers the shiny pink lips for an air kiss, and Boone can’t take his eyes off them.

The song is puff and tinsel but the crowd is hooked, and when it ends the applause is crazy. Boone doesn’t clap or cheer, he just stares, his drink forgotten in front of him.

“We have the fabulous First Recon Division here tonight, ladies and gentlemen,” she drawls into the microphone, smiling dazzlingly at every male in the audience, making each one feel sure she is flirting just with him. “Oh, my, what handsome hunks of men, I never!” The boys at Boone’s table go into a frenzy, whistling and hollering dementedly at the glittering vision in pink.

When the noise eventually dies down she whispers breathily, “This one’s for you, honeypie,” and Boone could swear she is looking straight at him.

“Happy birthday... to you...” she croons in a slow, sultry whisper, electrifying the room, stepping down from the stage and approaching the table where Boone is sitting still as marble. “Happy birth...day, Mistah First Recon... happy birthday to you.”

It takes her a while to reach him, only tiny footsteps possible in the absurdly tight dress. She sings a few lines from _Thanks for the Memory_ along the way.  
 _...and strictly entre-nous_  
 _darling, how are you?_  
 _and how are all the little dreams_  
 _that never did come true?_

Her silkily gloved fingers caress Boone’s cheek and along his jawline. He smells her perfume, sweet and mysterious. She perches on his lap. He doesn’t dare breathe. With one finger she lifts his chin and steals a little kiss, right on his mouth.

Boone dies.

Then she is away, wiggling her full hips as she wends her way back to the stage, turning only momentarily to purse those lips again and blow him a kiss.

For the first time since it happened, Bitter Springs is completely absent from Boone’s mind. The frown lines around his eyes have vanished, and the usual hard set of his mouth has gone, replaced by softer lips that want to be kissed again.

Craig Boone is in love.


	2. Chapter 2

The sniper’s art includes tracking. Later, when he has shaken off his drunken comrades and tracked her down at her suite in the Tops, booked under the pseudonym “Miss Baker”, she doesn’t look surprised to find him at her door. He knows no fancy ways of approaching a woman so he just plays it straight. A drink, and maybe dinner? She agrees.

They are given a very good table in the Ultra-Luxe, the maître d’ delighted to have such a handsome couple as guests; Boone more than happy to blow all his week’s pay.

“Now I’m a cabaret singer, mostly working for the NCR entertaining the troops, but I used to work in the movies, in New Reno,” she tells him, over a thick Brahmin steak. She eats well; he likes that.

She talks well too. Despite the way she came across on stage, in person she’s not coy. She tells him everything about herself, her history, her ambitions. She even tells him what she dreamed last night and asks his opinion of its possible meaning. The iconography of the dream was baffling: some things were giant-sized, others shrunken, locations changed inexplicably and inconsequential people from her past took starring roles; Boone couldn’t think of anything to say, but she didn’t seem to mind and kept chattering, and he didn’t mind her chatter. It was nice. Like her act; she kept right on keeping his mind away from the dark corners.

“I started as a fluffer then I became an actress, at the Golden Globes Studio. I was the lead in _Pullout: Post-Nuclear Boogaloo_ , did you see it?”  
Boone shakes his head. He has never seen any movie beyond the hygiene films they get shown in the NCR bases now and again. Here’s how to brush your teeth. This is what a crab looks like. Ladies, wipe from front to back.  
“It won an award. I was also in _Vault Sexteen_ and _Pokeahotass_. Tee hee! Oh, that was fun.”  
Boone nods, less than half listening, just watching her lips, smiling because he likes the way she laughs.

She asks him if his name is Irish. He says he doesn’t know, and she tells him that she thinks it is. Her name is Irish too, she says; Monroe.  
“But it’s not my real name, it’s just a stage name, for my career,” she whispers conspiratorially. “Don’t you think it sounds glamorous? Marilyn Monroe,” she says dreamily, looking up at the chandeliers as though they were constellations.  
Boone asks, “What’s your real name?” The first thing he’s asked her all evening, after asking her out.  
“Oh it’s boring. Carla Baker. Not showbizzy at all,” she says.  
Boone softly repeats, “Carla.”

***

Much later, when Carla Baker has become Carla Boone and they have settled in Novac, Craig Boone learns to play guitar to accompany her singing. He even sings a little himself, finding he likes the sense of release creativity gives him.

They sit around in the evenings outside Boone’s friend Ranger Andy’s bungalow, with Andy, Daisy the old lady from upstairs, another ex-cabaret singer called Bruce Isaac, and an old cowboy couple named Alice and Dusty McBride, playing, singing, and watching the sun go down.

Carla misses the limelight. She and Bruce often do a showy, overbaked duet of _Incurably Romantic_ together. Boone isn’t jealous. Carla is his, of that he has no doubt. The swell of her belly proves it.

Boone likes to sing the more humble _Cool Water_ with her. Their voices mesh together sublimely; his soft, low and sad, hers soft, high and sweet.

It’s a good life, and Boone is happier than he thinks he deserves to be.

It’s too good to be true.

...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Incurably Romantic_ is a funny song sung by Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand  
>  _Cool Water_ is a sad, sweet song sung by Isobel Campbell and Willy Mason
> 
> This story was originally written for the Falloutkinkmeme.


End file.
